Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Americans at Risk from Anti-Terrorism Law

By Alan
Caruba

As the year began,
President Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), said to
provide the government greater means to fight terrorism.

One of its
provisions would permit government law enforcement authorities to detain terror
suspects without trial and thus eviscerate the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to
the Constitution that protect citizens “against unreasonable searches and
seizures” and to ensure that “No person shall be held to answer for a capital,
or otherwise infamous crime, unless on presentment or indictment of a grand
jury…” with some exceptions.

On
December 14th, Politico.com reported that “the measure split
Democrats right down the middle, with 93 voting in favor and 93 against
legislation that President Barack Obama tactily endorsed earlier in the day be
retreating from a veto threat.” Civil liberties and human rights groups “were
in a furor Wednesday night over Obama’s decision to drop his veto threat
following changes made to the detainee-related sections of the bill.”

Kenneth
Roth of Human Rights Watch said, “By signing this defense spending bill,
President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined
indefinite detention without trial in U.S. law.”

In
Michigan, its House of Representatives unanimously voted to oppose NDAA 107-0.
Its bill asserts that no state employee or agency would assist the federal
government—in any way—in the detainment of people under the 2012 NDAA. The
Obama administration has reportedly aggressively argued in court that the
executive branch has this power. It does not. NDAA not only is
unconstitutional, it poses the greatest threat to individual freedom every
proposed by the government.

A law suit
was instituted in March against NDAA and it was initiated by leading members of
the nation’s left. They include Michael Moore, Daniel Ellsberg, Chris Hedges,
Noam Chromski, Naomi Wolf, and Cornell West. The suit was brought against
President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta,
House Speakers, and Department of Defense representatives for “injunctive
relief barring the implementation of the National Defense Authorization Act’s
‘homeland battlefield’ provisions for indefinite detention and suspension of
Habeus Corpus.

Chris
Hedges, a New York Times reporter, said at the time that “I have had dinner
more times than I can count with people whom this country brands as terrorists.
But does not make me one,” warning that “if there is no rolling back of the
NDAA law we cease to be a constitutional democracy. Totalitarian systems always
begin by rewriting the law. They make legal what was once illegal.”

“Crimes
become patriotic acts,” warned Hedges. “The defense of freedom and truth
becomes a crime. Foreign and domestic subjugation merges into the same brutal
mechanism. Citizens are colonized. And it is always done in the name of
national security. We obey the new laws as we obeyed the old laws, as if there
was no difference. And we spend our energy and our lives appealing to a dead
system.”

The lead
attorney, Carl Mayer, said, “The Homeland Battlefield Law is as Orwellian as
its name implies. America is not a ‘battlefield’; it is a democratic republic.
This law is unconstitutional because it violates the free speech and due
process rights of American citizens.”

The issue
of lost rights and protections is beginning to manifest itself in the public
forum. In a column published in the Washington Post in January, JonathanTurley, the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington
University, identified the many ways the civil liberties we take for granted
have been rolled back in the wake of 9/11. They include the assertion under both
President Bush and Obama to assassinate any citizen deemed a terrorist or an
abettor of terrorism. Both assert indefinite detention and the president may
now order warrantless searches, the use of secret evidence, and secret courts,
as well as immunity from judicial review. This is not just unconstitutional, it
is totalitarianism in bold letters.

A former
member of the National Security Agency, William Binney, recently warned that
all Americans are under virtual surveillance. Binney said that “the FBI can
access the emails of virtually everybody in the nation.” The former director of
the CIA, Gen. David Patreaus, discovered that to his dismay.

On May 16th,
an Obama-appointed judge, Katherine B. Forrest, blocked the section of last
year’s NDAA that purported to ‘reaffirm’ the 2001 authorization to use military
force against al Qaeda. The judge agreed with the plaintiffs that the relevant
section of the law was “not merely an ‘affirmation.” Judge Forrest pointed out
that a variety of other statutes permit the detention of those engaged in
terrorism or its support.

The
wording of the law passed by the House reinstates the provision to detain
anyone the federal government deems a terrorist threat for any reason,
including as Hedges pointed out, having dinner with a suspected terrorist.

Does it
come as any surprise that, on December 31, 2011, President Obama signed the
NDAA, codifying indefinite military detention without charge or trail into law
for the first time in American history?

Sad to
say, the Bush administration asserted similar claims of worldwide detention
authority to hold even a U.S. citizen detained on U.S. soil in military
custody. The ACLU, a liberal organization, is on record saying that “any
military detention of American citizens or others within the United States is
unconstitutional and illegal, including under the NDAA” adding that “the
breadth of the NDAA’s detention authority violates international law because it
is not limited to people captured in the context of an actual armed conflict as
required by the laws of war.”

When those
on the far left line up against such a law, you have to know it is noxious,
unconstitutional, and a threat to the life and liberty of every American. It is
nothing less than a form of Nazism.

5 comments:

I can only make sense of this post if I assume you originally wrote about the passage of the NDAA on Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2011, and reused much of that post in this one. The uncertain sense in the post as it stands takes away from its seriousness as a landmark warning for our country.

Does this mean that Obama would have approved of the South African Governments' detention-without-trial laws that were enforced in the mid 1980's? It (SA Laws) was also aimed at reducing "terrorism", after all.

Tybo: I suspect Obama would have approved of the South African laws as well. I fear that "terrorism" is being used to deprive Americans of their constitutional rights. History shows that such rights, once lost, are rarely regained.

Tybo - South Africa was facing a REAL terrorist invasion via Angola by the Cubans, Russians and East Germany and internally from the terrorist, communist ANC. Billions in arms were transported to Angola to use this route to invade SA. As it is, the South African military gave them a thorough hiding proving why the rest of the world wanted the end of the Apartheid government. A strong government able to defend the country and being self-reliant with abundant energy, food and technology and home to all the mineral wealth you can dream of. South Africa was a threat to the international bully boys and had to end. And so was born the plot to handover the country to the communist ANC, which has now gone on to prove why Africans shouldn't be in charge of any country. However, I digress. Alan is correct and Obama is slowly removing cornerstones of your freedoms. It's like a puzzle - it will all fit together eventually - the American people just haven't seen the picture Obama is hiding.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.